{"id":2722,"date":"2009-09-30T19:15:38","date_gmt":"2009-10-01T00:15:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theoreti.ca\/?p=2722"},"modified":"2009-09-30T19:15:38","modified_gmt":"2009-10-01T00:15:38","slug":"princetonian-kindles-yet-to-woo-university-users","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/?p=2722","title":{"rendered":"Princetonian: Kindles yet to woo University users"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Thanks to Sean for pointing me to a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dailyprincetonian.com\/2009\/09\/28\/23918\/\">story about Princeton&#8217;s experiment with Kindles<\/a> replacing textbooks. In a pilot program students in certain courses were given a Kindle DX with all their course readings. Princeton was partnering with Amazon.com (Bezos went to Princeton) as part of a sustainability initiative to save paper. The problem is that the students didn&#8217;t like using the Kindles.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages \u2014 not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs,\u201d he explained. \u201cAll these things have been lost, and if not lost they\u2019re too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the \u2018features\u2019 have been rendered useless.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Stan Katz (who was one of the instructors experimenting) is quoted in the Princetonian story supporting the student view. He found the Kindle hard to annotate and he found that without page numbers it was hard for students to cite accurately.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The Kindle doesn\u2019t give you page numbers; it gives you location numbers. They have to do that because the material is reformatted,\u201d Katz said. He noted that while the location numbers are \u201cconvenient for reading,\u201d they are \u201cmeaningless for anyone working from analog books.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>There is a <a href=\"http:\/\/news.slashdot.org\/story\/09\/09\/29\/0133221\/In-Trial-Kindles-Disappointing-University-Users\">Slashdot summary with lots of comments<\/a> too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thanks to Sean for pointing me to a story about Princeton&#8217;s experiment with Kindles replacing textbooks. In a pilot program students in certain courses were given a Kindle DX with all their course readings. Princeton was partnering with Amazon.com (Bezos went to Princeton) as part of a sustainability initiative to save paper. The problem is &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/?p=2722\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Princetonian: Kindles yet to woo University users<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,17,13,9,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-arts","category-humanities-computing","category-interface-design-and-usability","category-literature","category-markup-and-text-representation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2722"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2722\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2723,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2722\/revisions\/2723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}